The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Picking cotton by hand is notoriously laborious, time consuming, and fraught with ergonomic and safety concerns. Collectors must stoop to pick bolls (as used herein bolls is defined as the cotton lint including the seed) from plants and constantly contend with sharp dry spines that cut the skin. When harvesting cotton in a research setting, it is often important to collect all bolls from a cotton plant. Because of the ergonomic and safety concerns, collectors tend to skip over those bolls located on the plant in areas that are hard to reach or not immediately visible. Thus, seeds from the bolls collected by hand may not uniformly represent the genetics of the population leading to spurious data and false conclusions.